The Secretary of Homeland Security and two of his predecessors are calling on lawmakers to remove the politics from the debate over funding the department. Jeh Johnson, the current DHS secretary, and Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, DHS leaders under former President George W. Bush, berated the decision of Congress to tie DHS funding to the immigration debate. Federal News Radio Executive Editor Jason Miller tells In Depth with Francis Rose about the latest with impending partial DHS shutdown and what it will mean to agency employees and contractors.

The Veterans Affairs Department is requesting $20 million in fiscal 2016 to move its appeals processes from a mix of paper and electronic processes to only electronic. The additional funding is part of VA's $4.13 billion IT request to Congress.

Budget cuts forced the IRS to reduce the number of tax audits last year to the lowest level in a decade, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday. And the number of audits could be even lower this year.

The IRS is in a bind to be both fast and accurate with this season's tax returns, and awards billions in fraudulent claims as a result. That's a problem that will only get worse unless Congress raises IRS' budget to allow for new hires, according to the National Treasury Employees Union.

Andy Ozment, the assistant secretary of the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications within the National Protections and Programs Directorate (NPPD), said the continuous diagnostics and mitigation (CDM) and Einstein 3A programs would be "gravely" affected if Congress doesn't pass DHS funding bill by Feb. 28.

Training money is usually one of the first casualties of tight budget times. But some agencies are finding ways around current budget pressures to get their employees what they need. One of them is the Department of Agriculture. Billy Milton is chief human capital officer at USDA. On In Depth with Francis Rose, he explained how USDA is getting its training done with the resources it has.